


You're the Reason I Come Home

by orphan_account



Category: Benedict Cumberbatch - Fandom, Real Person Fiction
Genre: DaddyBatch, Established Relationship, F/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-19
Updated: 2013-01-06
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:50:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not always easy, this starting a life together lark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Benedict takes you to Paris over the New Year’s holiday because he knows you love the city in winter; you’ve been there just once before, when you were younger. It had been late November and you’ve told him how beautiful it was to walk along the tree-lined cobblestone streets with a warm bag of roasted chestnuts in hand. They’re your favourite. He knows that, too. So he books a suite at the Ritz and as soon as you’re checked in, he sweeps you out into the brisk December air and hustles you both down the narrow alleyways away from the hotel until he finds an older French man roasting the bulbous nuts over an open oil barrel. He buys them for you so he can see your face light up. The small treats split open from the heat and smell divine. Holding the parcel warms your chilled fingers; and just how pleased he looks with himself warms your heart. 

You amble around the city at a much more leisurely pace after that, admiring the lights and holly leaves left over from Christmas, strung around street signs and framing the shop windows along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There is something approaching peaceful about the city, post-Noel, a calm that suggests that while families haven’t yet given over to the despair of winter, the adrenaline rush of the holidays is ebbing away. There will be New Year’s and there will be the Twelfth Night celebrations of January 5, but just now, in the post-coital haze of gifts and food and family, Paris seems quiet… and London seems a world away. It is a perfect sort of afternoon, and you slip your arm through Benedict’s, crooked as it is against his body, for a proper promenade. Your breath floats out before you in a heavy cloud, mingling with his. You try to hold yourself against him even tighter.

Eventually you come to pass through a quaint winter market selling pastel sweets and candied violets and when you pause to watch the slow pull and stretch of a salt-water taffy machine, Benedict kisses your flushed cheeks and pink nose. There’s a family standing in front of you at the stall, a couple no older than yourselves, with two small children clinging to them. The little girl looks to be about 3 or 4 and has her arms flung around her father’s legs in desperate affection. She’s peering up at the rows of sweets and pleading with her papa for something in beautifully childish French.

The woman holds the other child in her arms, a boy hovering around a year old. His cheeks are pink from the cold even though he’s bundled up in jumpsuit with a fur-lined hood pulled snug around his face, and he has the string of his hood in his mouth and a trail of drool down his chin. He’s peeking over his mother’s shoulder at the two of you, eyes all bright blue and gleaming. After a moment the child’s eyes seem to focus on Benedict alone, and a toothless smile is spreading across his face. You glance up at Benedict and notice he’s making faces at the baby, contorting his features in all sorts of odd and endearing ways until the child starts gurgling happily. The little boy starts to wiggle in his mother’s arms a bit, breaking into a full-on laugh, as Benedict continues showering him with attention from afar. The woman tries to still his over-excited body and shoots you both a look.

“Votre bébé est adorable,” you say, offering a kind smile. She returns it with a nod.

“Très adorable,” Benedict adds a moment too late, as if suddenly awaking from some reverie. 

During the exchange, the father has conceded to his daughter’s sweet tooth and bought her a small bag of brightly coloured candies. She is thanking him politely as the family begins to walk away, leaving you clutching Benedict’s arm as he watches them go with something close to longing on his face. You feel it too. There’s a tightness in your chest, something that seems to seize you inside whenever you’re around young families. You’ve always wanted to be a mother, and in moments like this you can very nearly feel just how badly Benedict yearns to be a father. 

You’ve talked about it of course, but somehow those talks never seem to get you anywhere; Benedict always ends with a resigned look on his face as he goes back to his emails and you’re left with the painful tingling behind your eyes of withheld tears. The truth is, Benedict has been in a different city every other month this year, jetting from London to New York to L.A., and back again. He never quite unpacks; there is always a half-full suitcase on the floor of the bedroom you share. His life is meetings with studio heads and directors and publicists, fashion designers and magazine editors. Any spare moment he has he’s reading through scripts on his iPad. You keep yourself busy in London, but it’s never easy to watch him go, to say goodbye and promise to call/text/email/Skype. You can only imagine how much harder it’d all be with a baby added to the mix. You don’t want to spoil the mood by bringing up the idea once more. You love him. He loves you. For now, it’s enough.

You watch dusk overtake the gentle evening from a small sidewalk café on the left bank where you both make fools of yourself trying to slurp oysters on the half shell, washing them down with the over-priced champagne the waiter insisted would go best. You are feeling spectacularly and properly wooed. 

Walking hand-in-hand, you head towards the Ile Saint-Louis for a small ice cream from Berthillon’s, which seems like a ridiculous thing to do in December but you insist and, of course, Benedict indulges you. There is very little in this world he would deny you when you purse your lips in that tiny pout of yours and bat your eyelashes. It’s predictable, but it works on him. Every time. At the shop you decide on the café au whisky and Benedict goes for the Praliné au citron et coriander, which you both agree is thoroughly odd but somehow delicious. You take turns licking from each other’s cones, and then from each other’s lips, and you quickly find yourselves wound up in each other on the Pont Marie while dusk gives way at last to night. 

The streetlamps flicker on all around you and your intertwined bodies are silhouetted directly beneath one, but no one minds two young lovers embracing on a bridge because it’s Paris.

“Ready to go back to the hotel?” he whispers against your ear, kissing the sensitive spot just behind it. You hum gently, the vibrations traveling along your throat where his lips are now pressed, and it’s all the confirmation Benedict needs. He slinks his arms around your waist and pulls you against his hip, and together you saunter away back towards the Place Vendôme, stopping half a dozen times to kiss slowly in the lamplight. 

Back in the suite, Benedict strips you down with careful and practiced ease. First the heavy coat, buttoned all up the front and belted at the waist, followed by the sweater dress your sister gave you for Christmas. You step out of your heels and he backs you up against the bed. You drop back onto it while he sinks to his knees before you and pulls off your tights slowly, kissing along your legs as they become bare. You slide further back onto the bed and lean against the headboard, watching as he stands before you, shedding his own clothing with less grace and more urgency. The last things to go are your tiny pieces of Agent Provocateur lingerie, clinging to all the right places that Benedict wants to get at most; he pins you beneath him and smiles with heavily lidded eyes as he relieves you of them.

What follows is a series of very fortunate kisses and moans and gasps, murmured words of affection, promises of devotion, pet names—beautiful and dirty—and some rather spectacular screaming. You don’t say anything when he pushes into you without protection, and you don’t say anything later about the look of desperation you’d notice burning in his eyes with every thrust. Afterwards you lay beside each other atop the dishevelled bed, breathing heavily, him on his back and you to his left, on your stomach. You grab his hand and hold it tightly between you both.

Benedict brings it up to his mouth and kisses your entwined fingers before laying them on his chest, which is still rising and falling rapidly.

“I love you,” he says. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” you say. “And I, you.” He turns to look at you, his eyes tired and slightly glazed over. “I do. Love you, that is.” Your words are beginning to slur, the exhaustion of the last few weeks finally catching up to you.

“That’s what I hoped you’d say.” Your eyes are about to flutter shut when you feel an unexpected pressure on your hand. You crook one eye open to see Benedict’s fingers pressing against one of your own, still sprawled across his heart. When he removes them, there’s an impressive diamond glinting up at you from a simple platinum band wrapped around your ring finger.

“Oh, Benedict,” you breathe out shakily. His eyes are wide now, and searching. “Yes, darling. Of course. Yes.”


	2. Chapter 2

The wedding is small and quick, for no reason other than that’s how you’ve always wanted it: no frills. You return to from Paris late on New Year’s Day and visit the registry office the next morning to give notice. Two weeks later you are standing before the registrar in a small suite in the Harrow Arts Centre, with Benedict grinning madly at your side. 

You’re wearing your grandmother’s crème velvet wedding dress because It was her dying wish that it be worn once more and you’re its last chance. It was always a dress fit for a winter bride, anyway. Only your families sit in attendance: your parents fly in from New Orleans, your brother from NYC, your sister from L.A.; Benedict’s parents drive up from London. Everyone cries.

You meet friends for a small reception afterwards in a private room at the Groucho Club in Soho. The whole thing passes in a champagne-induced blur, with a whirlwind of congratulations and impromptu speeches and bad dancing that makes you feel like you’re back at university. It’s nearly the next morning before you both collapse on a bed at the Dorchester. It’s Sunday now and you only have the day. Benedict is due in Cardiff on Monday morning. There is no time for a Honeymoon, but it’s okay because you’ll always have Paris. You spend the whole day… consummating. 

After that, things continue much the way they always have. Benedict spends his weeks in Cardiff and returns home every weekend. At least you’re both on the same small island most of the time, now—until the next project, that is. Benedict’s been lining them up: he’ll be off to L.A. again once Sherlock is done in April and then possibly back to New Orleans for something else. The offers keep rolling in. As for you, you split your time between a UCL seminar room, your closet-of-an-office, or the British Library reading room; undergraduate papers on Hemingway and Fitzgerald keep you company at night. Your diary is not nearly so glamorous as his, but you’re making it work.

January slowly and inevitably gives way to the dreariness of February. You buy more wool jumpers to cope with this fact. When Benedict’s home, you take walks together across Hampstead Heath and he lets you moan to him because in your girlhood memories of New Orleans, February was never so cold. He doesn’t bother reminding you that you went to university in New England, or that you did your graduate work at Oxford, or that you’ve been living in London for nearly three years. He doesn’t tell you that you should be used to the cold by now, he just bundles you up in his arms until the only thing you can think about is how delicious he smells.

You wake up early on Sunday as your stomach churns. You roll onto your belly and bury your face in your pillow, willing the nausea to go away. You refuse to be sick. It is much too pedestrian to be sick in February. You drink tea and always eat your greens and you layer-up before you go out in the cold. You cannot be ill. 

Except, apparently, you are. You launch yourself out of bed with a groan and stumble into the en suite, falling to your knees in front of the toilet. Everything from yesterday makes a re-appearance. 

Benedict kneels behind you a moment later, rubbing circles on your back as you lay your head against the porcelain bowl.

“Poor thing,” he murmurs, kissing the back of your neck. He pulls you away from the toilet to rest up against him, your back to his front. He touches the back of his hand to your forehead, checking for a fever. “I hope it was just something you ate, and not the flu,” he says unhelpfully. Despite his best efforts, he doesn’t make for a very good doctor—he can’t tell if your skin is any hotter than normal and there is no thermometer to be found in the flat. You remember that he didn’t grow up taking care of younger siblings when they were home sick from school, and so forgive him just a bit. He helps you back to bed and offers to make you soup. You let him because really, it’s the thought that counts. 

You don’t feel feverish yourself, but you throw up the soup Benedict gives you an hour later, and so decide to spend the day in bed all the same. You feel weak without anything in your stomach. Benedict lies with you, absentmindedly caressing your fingers as he flicks through scripts on his iPad. He kisses you on the forehead when he pauses in his reading to give his eyes a rest; you tell him that’s how your dad used to check for a fever when you were a child, but Benedict still can’t tell. “You useless man,” you mutter playfully, curling into his side.

By that evening you manage to keep down some saltine crackers, but they come back up the next morning and Benedict is hesitant to leave you to return to Cardiff. You assure him that you don’t feel all that terrible—aside from the vomiting—and he needs to go, for the sake of his colleagues. So he does, but only after you promise you’ll call if it gets worse. You manage to get showered and dressed, and though you feel a bit woozy, you make it through your afternoon seminar sipping on some ginger ale. A student offers you a small bag of crisps during her tutorial on Faulkner because she thinks you look pale, but those come back up in the ladies room right afterwards. 

And the week goes on.

You spend your mornings clutching the sides of the toilet, often times retching up nothing but bile, but you end each evening with a generous curry or some Chinese take-away, having spent the whole day sucking on ginger candies to settle your stomach. You have a small row with Benedict when he returns home on Friday night because your cheeks have hollowed some and he thinks your wrist bones are sticking out too much. You’re pale and there are faint bruises under your eyes from the nights you’ve spent tossing and turning, trying to find a position that helps alleviate the pain in your lower back and the pounding headaches that started up mid-week.

“Love, you were meant to call me if you got worse. I would’ve come home. I would’ve taken care of you,” he purrs into your ear, holding you close on the couch after the argument has simmered down. 

“But I’m fine, I really am,” you assure him, because you are. Most of the time. You just can’t seem to eat or sleep properly, and for some reason this worries Benedict much more than it does you.

“I hate seeing you like this,” he says, his voice strained. 

“It will pass, I’m sure of it. I’ve got a really strong immune system, I promise. I was hardly ever sick as a kid.”

“Please make an appointment to see your GP, love. Please.” You promise you will, mostly because you’d hate to see the weekend spoiled by his anxieties. You spend the next two days together fixing up a few things around the house before heading to Leicester Square for the premiere of one of Benedict’s mate’s films on Sunday. You wear a dark green dress that hangs loose on your frame, and lots of under-eye concealer. A friend at the premiere tells you how skinny you’re looking, which makes Benedict look worried and sick. You can’t help but feel pleased, though.

Benedict leaves again early Monday morning, on the first train from Paddington. It’s still dark when he goes. You call your GP later that day and she tells you she can fit you in late on Tuesday. 

On Wednesday morning you’re clammy and shaking a little and on a train to Cardiff, with a small wrapped box sitting on your lap. England goes by outside your window faster than you’d prefer it to, all dead trees and undulating pastures, and once the road signs stop making sense, you know you’re in Wales. You grab a cab at the station and take it across town to the studio.

You’re directed to Benedict’s trailer by the second AD, where you find him nursing a mug of strong tea as he goes over his lines. A practice violin is sitting at his feet and his newly dyed black curls have been wrestled into place by entirely too much hair pomade. “Surprise!” you say hesitantly, peeking your head in. Certainly Benedict looks surprised. He spits his mouthful of tea back into his mug and clambers to his feet.

“Darling! What are you doing here!” he exclaims, rushing towards you to pull you fully into the trailer before wrapping you up in a quick hug. When you step away, you can feel his eyes running over you, and you’re suddenly very aware that your hair is looking slightly frazzled in some semblance of a braid and you’ve been wearing the same shirt for two days now. You even slept in it last night and it must smell like his aftershave and Earl Grey—you spilt some of your morning cuppa down your front on your way out the door today. Benedict motions you to take a seat on the couch but you remain standing. He cocks an eyebrow at that.

“I went to see the doctor yesterday,” you begin. His eyes travel over you once more and his face drops. He’s desperately trying to deduce where this conversation is going. He’s got four ideas so far and doesn’t like a single one.

“Oh god, are you okay?” he asks, stepping closer to you so he can cup your face in his hands. He is searching for something unsavoury in your eyes and praying he doesn’t find it.

“Here,” you say, handing him the small box you brought with you by way of an answer.

“Love? What is this? What’s going on? Are you okay?”

“Just open it,” you insist. You notice he’s gone a bit pale himself and his legs don’t seem entirely reliable, so he takes a seat before unwrapping the box. You lean up against the doorframe and watch him, your face a mask.

Benedict unknots the twine and peels back the stiff brown paper, lifting the flaps of the box to reveal an entirely unremarkable tea mug. He pulls it out, his brow furrowed. It’s white and generic, but as he spins it around, he reads in large black print on the opposite side: World’s Greatest Dad. His eyes shoot up to meet yours instantly.

“What is this?” He dismisses all his earlier deductions and focuses on the steady beat of his heart, which is insisting this can only mean one thing…

“A gift.”

“For whom?”

“The world’s greatest dad, it would seem.”

“And who might that be?” Benedict swallows hard and stares at you with eyes that dare not be too hopeful. His body is betraying him, of course, and he has to blink back tears.

“You, you tit.” You crack a smile. “I mean, you’ve got a few months to work up to it, but come September…” You lay a hand over your stomach. He looks like he’s afraid to move until he actually hears the words.

“So you’re…”

“Pregnant, yes.”

“And I’m…”

“Going to be a dad, yes. And the greatest one at that, if that mug is anything to go by. I’m certain they don’t let just anyone buy those sorts of declarations.” There is a beat before he launches himself at you and grabs your face to crush his lips to yours in a bruising kiss. His cheeks are wet now, as are yours. You’re both crying and laughing and trying to keep your lips pressed together, and it’s all a mess, and it’s all beautiful. 

“Oh my god, oh my god,” he mutters, kissing down your neck. You run your hands delicately through his hair, careful to not wreck the perfectly styled creation too much. With your arms around his neck, he pauses in the worship of your neck to lean his forehead against yours, his eyes closed. “We’re going to have a family,” he whispers. 

“Tell me you’re happy,” you plead.

“This is all I’ve ever wanted,” he says. You press your lips to his once more and his hands come to rest on your still-flat stomach.

Everything is going to be just fine. Yes.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This part is a little bit angsty. It’ll all come back around, though. Promise.

Benedict doesn’t budge when the second AD comes rapping at his trailer door the first time, telling him they’re ready for him on set. He’s sprawled out across the couch with you on his lap, your legs entwined strangely. He has lifted your shirt up and has been ghosting his fingers over your belly for the past fifteen minutes, murmuring sentimental endearments against your skin.

“There’s nothing really in there yet,” you tell him. “You know that, right? It’s just a tiny spark of a thing.” His hand pauses above your navel.

“You’re wrong, love. It’s not nothing. It’s our child.” His tone is both scolding and thick with emotion—the reality of this is still settling in—and you acquiesce.

“Yes, our child.” You like the sound of that. You hum contently against him, and once he can see your lips pulling into a drossy sort of smile, he begins stroking your stomach again.

There is another knock against his trailer and you both groan simultaneously because you know you can’t stay here, like this, always, in a moment that seems too perfect to disturb. At some point the outside world was going to force itself in. “You’ve got to go,” you tell him, and you can feel him nod. And he does goes, after a lot of repositioning and see-you-soon kisses. Having slept poorly the night before, you elect to stay behind and kip in Benedict’s heated trailer instead of following behind to watch the filming.

Within the hour, the whole Sherlock team is in on it. Maybe even the whole of BBC Cardiff. By the end of the week, half the British acting pool knows. It reaches the States not long after that and gifts pour in from all over: a leather-bound collection of children’s fairy tales from Steven Spielberg, a Star Trek onesie from J. J. Abrams, a hand-stitched blanket from Una Stubbs, an ink and watercolour rendering of Frankenstein and his Creature from Danny Boyle with “This is your universe” scrawled across the page in a delicate hand—it comes framed and with a note that says simply, “For the nursery. My congratulations.” Benedict’s brooding over the years has known no bounds and everyone seems glad to finally hear the solution has been found.

While you still have the energy, you spend your weekends ensuring all the renovations to that flat are finished before the baby arrives—a project Benedict started well over a year ago. The place has been nearly finished for months but this turns out to be just the impetus Benedict needs to tackle all the final touches: you finally get your clawfoot tub in the upstairs W.C. and the second bedroom slowly transforms into a nursery. Benedict is learning to “nest”—something he picked up in one of the dozen or so baby books he’s taken to reading between takes on set. You don’t know exactly what Benedict did with the guest bed or the wardrobe, but you return one day from the shops to find them cleared away and replaced with a chest of drawers and a changing table. 

Your parents send you the dismantled crib that survived the sleepless nights of three different babies and watching Benedict try to reassemble it is easily one of the most painfully hilarious afternoons of your life. You end up calling your father back in the States to help talk Benedict through it.

When it’s done, Benedict collapses against wall in a huff. He is not the picture of accomplishment, but instead seems oddly disappointed with himself.

“What’s wrong, love? You seem to have done alright by this old crib.” You give the oak railings a jiggle to prove your point. “Sturdy as anything, I’d say.”

“Only because you phoned your father.”

“That’s what fathers are for.”

“Exactly!” You aren’t expecting the small outburst and flinch when Benedict launches the screwdriver across the room.

“What was that for?”

“I’m useless! I’m going to be rubbish father.” Benedict draws his knees up to his chest and leans his forehead against them. You kneel beside him and rub a hand up his arm and over his shoulder, trying to soothe him and coax him to look at you.

“That’s absurd. You are going to be an absolutely brilliant dad, Benedict. Look at me.” He tilts his head towards you so you can spot one eyes from underneath his dark mop of Sherlock hair. “How can you say something like that?”

“Your father can build cribs over the phone.”

“So? He’s always been able to do that sort of thing—that’s just how his brain works. He’s an engineer.”

“He can build cribs from memory. God, the way you talk about him… how you’ve never had to go to a car mechanic because your dad has always been able to fix whatever the problem is just by reading the owner’s manual closely enough. How he re-roofed the house and re-finished all the wood flooring, how he can take apart a computer and build a new one back up. How he helped you with your calculus homework and your physics homework and knew how to take your goddamn temperature to see if you were sick—“ He breaks off suddenly and inhales deeply to refocus himself. He’s trying desperately to not get too upset. “I can’t do any of that.”

“Who says you have to be able to do any of that to be a good father? That’s just who my dad is. Can your dad fix cars and computers and houses and still remember physics formulas he hasn’t seen since university?”

“No.”

“And yet he managed to raise you just fine!” You’re trying to be helpful but Benedict isn’t having it.

“My parents sent me away to be raised because they couldn’t do it themselves,” is his answer. Your face falls.

“And I take it Harrow didn’t have auto shop as an elective?” Benedict gives a small laugh—it’s really closer to a sigh of resignation, but you’ll take it. “Benedict, all my dad really was, was caring and involved. Reliable. He came home from work every evening at the same time and I could depend on him. He never missed a dance recital or an awards ceremony. He helped me if I needed help.” You crawl in front of Benedict and situate yourself between his bent knees so you can get close enough to cup his face in your hands. “He loved me. That’s all that really mattered in the end, what made him a good father. You don’t have to know your way around the bonnet of a car to be worthy of that mug I gave you.”

“We’re really doing this, aren’t we?” You grab his hands and guide them to your belly—it’s mid-April and at just over four months, your stomach is starting to round.

“I should say so, yeah.”

“God, I must sound like such a prat, going on and on about not being able to build a damn crib while your sitting here my child—our child—squirming around inside you. Really, forget me being rubbish at this or not because you, love, are going to be brilliant. You are brilliant. You’re wonderful and beautiful and… I still can’t believe my luck.”

“You certainly know how to make a girl blush.” Benedict slides his hands from your stomach until they’re snug around your waist, pulling you close. Your lips come together in a delicate kiss, one full of every hope you both have for the life you’re building together right now, in this moment.

You help Benedict calm himself down by making tea and getting him started talking about children’s books—ones he remembers from when he was young, ones you remember. Curled up against each other on the hard wood floor of the nursery, you build an entire library for your unborn child. You both agree on things like A. A. Milne and Beatrix Potter, Shel Silverstein and Maurice Sendak; Benedict tells you he’s going to read to the child every night before bed, as his father did for him, and you tell him its a beautiful idea. You kiss him slowly and say things like, “See? You’re going to be wonderful at this, darling.” And everything goes back to being good again. You don’t think of all the nights you’ll do the bedtime reading and the tucking-in by yourself while he’s away filming. You add it to the list of things you won’t let yourself think too much about and focus instead on being incandescently happy.

Three days later Benedict leaves for L.A. It’s the fist of May. You’ve got final essays and exams to proctor keeping you in London through June. Your belly has grown and Benedict massages it gently over your dress out of habit when he kisses you goodbye. You imagine one day you’ll get used to this, the him leaving and you staying. You’ll get used to smiling when your heart feels like it’s rending itself apart. This is the last project he’ll take, he says, before the baby’s born. Just a few months and then he’ll be with you at every doctor’s appointment, every Lamaze class. Because he truly wants to be. He smiles, promises to call when he gets there, bends to kiss your stomach quickly, and gets in a cab to Heathrow. You stand on the pavement and wave goodbye as the cab disappears around the street corner. Two months, you tell yourself. Two months and you’ll join in him.

Benedict calls you from California everyday. Each time he tells you that he wishes you were there with him, sharing candy floss on the Santa Monica pier. You remind him it’s called cotton candy there. He asks about the baby, demands to hear about every check-up, every new scan, searching for anything he can mark off from the pregnancy checklists in his baby books. He is yearning to hold you against him and feel the baby move between you both, he says. His dad has been giving him weekly lectures on fatherhood via Skype. 

Two weeks after he’s left London, you have an appointment to find out the sex of the baby. When you ask Benedict if he wants to know—he’s been working over his lists of baby names for months now (Cumberbatch is not the easiest name to work with, it turns out)—it takes him a moment to decide, leaving you spread out on the examination table with cold ultrasound gel smeared around your belly for an awkward minute. Finally he says on other other end of the phone, thousands of miles away, “No. No, I think I want it to be a surprise,” and you keep it to yourself.

Once Benedict lets slip about how he invites your sister out for lunch when he misses you too much, bribing her with a free meal to get her to tell him stories about you as a child. Your sister texts you each time this happens. By June the count is holding steady at seven.

Benedict’s calls change as the weeks drag on. He’s getting tired, unusually tired, it seems. L.A. is harder this time around, he says. The hours are long, but they always are. There are fewer anonymous beach outings and more business meeting at restaurants on the Stip. there are more parties and more nights that turn to mornings without him seeing his bed. He’s balancing filming and press for Star Trek and dealing with the fall out of more ill-quoted magazine interviews all at the same time. Barely.

But he still calls, he still always manages to call. You wake up every morning at 7am so his voice can he the first thing you hear that day. But more often than not, his voice is gruff and strained. When you get him on Skype, you can see the lines around his eyes growing deeper the tanner he gets. Sometimes his eyes are bloodshot and he is apologetic and he tells you over and over how much he misses you, how much he needs you to be with him. It’s the 30th of June. He asks you to fly out to L.A. but you can’t. “Just for the weekend,” he nearly begs. You’ve got a conference to go to in Berlin. Pretty soon you won’t be able to fly.

You miss him. You cry yourself to sleep some nights… most nights. You don’t tell him this.

Benedict does not sound angry when it’s time for him to hang up and get back to set. He’s not angry, but everything is not all right. He sniffs a few times, like his nose is clogged up, and tells you he loves you, that he loves the baby, and that he misses you both. He promises to call tomorrow because this is how he ends every phone call.

But Benedict doesn’t call at 7am the next morning. You try his mobile, but it goes straight to voicemail. You try to go about the day in something other than a panic. You pack for Germany. You sit in the Costa Coffee around the corner from your flat finishing some last minute revisions to the paper you’re presenting there. You send him a few texts throughout the afternoon, but he never responds. You think of calling his agent or publicist, or maybe someone else on the production, but think better of it. He’s just busy. He’ll call when he can.

You wake up in July to a shooting pain in your abdomen.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Firstly, so sorry this took me so long to get this part up! Secondly, I thank you in advance for bearing with me through all the angsty bits. This will either be five or six parts, most likely, depending on how the next one gets on.

It feels like the worst cramp you could ever imagine, like something is contracting and tearing low in your gut. No, no, please. No, you think. Oh god, it hurts. It hurts but it could be worse, you tell yourself. And you need that to be true, because if it’s not, if this is the very worst thing, you don’t know if you and Benedict will survive it. You reach your hand down between your legs and it comes away smeared with dark blood. You cry out but there’s no one there to hear you. 

Your hands shake as you fumble at your bedside table for your mobile. There’s a tiny smudge of blood on your wedding ring, which seems to gleam a bit less brightly on your left hand. You dial 999 because that’s all you have now, voices at the end of telephone lines, stretched across the city, across an ocean. Benedict. Your family. Even your friends from work seem to have all scattered for the summer—to conferences in China or research grants in Oklahoma. You think you feel your heart splintering with this simple realization: you are utterly alone. Like water does in winter, seeping in the pavement to freeze apart cracks, wide and jagged, the truth of isolation is opening up ravines of hurt deep in your insides. It’s July but you’re suddenly very cold.

An operator on the other end of the line speaks to you too formally, her scratchy tone practiced and detached. It is meant to be reassuring, calm. You hate it. You don’t need calm. You need someone who loves you enough to panic, to throw precaution to the wind, to cling to you and rush with you to hospital. Someone who can share the burden of utterly dread that has suddenly settled on your shoulders. Benedict did not text or call during the night.

So you sit in bed alone, your sheets stained red, and speak calmly to the operator. The wave of pain is receding. Your breathing is evening back out. You need to get to A&E, she says, but you decline her offer to send an ambulance. You’re okay, you tell her. You tell yourself. You’ll be fine. You’ll get cleaned up and get a cab and get to the hospital all on your own. Because the one person you need to hold your hand through this is half a world away.

\---------- ---------- ----------

The whole ordeal turns out to be rather unremarkable, you think to yourself, propped up in a hospital bed with a bruise blossoming on the back of your hand where your IV is stuck in. Where was the drama? The frantic doctors and the thrumming soundtrack? The beeps of the machines on either side of your bed are steady and quiet. Your paper gown makes a bit of noises if you around too much.

You had arrived at A&E with all the parade and enthusiasm of a death march really, with wide eyes—no longer watery—and pursed lips. You diplomatically answered all the nurse’s questions with filled-out the requisite paperwork in a clean, legible hand. You waited in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room and then in a hard plastic chair outside of a nurse’s station, and then you finally made it into a room to be examined by a doctor—who had poked you mercilessly and asked more questions. Then came the tests, which had you sprawled out on your back while strange men and women came to know very private parts of you, very intimately. The doctor delivered his diagnosis with cautious solemnity: Grade 2 Placental Abruption. There has been a tear in the placenta away from the uterus and the fetal heartbeat showed mild signs of distress—it’s not enough for him to induce preterm labor or suggest an emergency C-section, but it’s more than enough for him to keep you and the baby under observation for the next few days.

The baby is okay. Right now, the baby is okay. You wrap your arms around your stomach and repeat this over and over again. You sit and cry right there in your hospital bed. 

You’re in a private room, of course, but really that only makes it that much more obvious that you’re here by yourself. As the hours stretch on, it’s made painfully clear that there is no one sitting out in the waiting room for you, praying for news. You’ve seen the nurses glance at the ring on your finger but they never ask you where your husband is. They cock an eyebrow sometimes, but no one ever asks. There are two heartbeats beeping out a rhythm on the machines around you but you’ve never felt more alone.

Your mobile is switched off on the table beside you. You want so badly to keep dialing Ben’s number again but you can’t, you just can’t. Every unanswered call breaks your heart just a tiny bit more and you’re trying very hard at the moment to be very brave about this. You think about phoning your parents, but you can’t call them either: it would destroy your mother that she’s not here to kiss it all better. 

It’s late afternoon before you give in and phone Ben’s parents. Wanda and Timothy live on the outskirts of London proper and could be at the hospital in half an hour if you asked them. You won’t, of course, because you won’t be able to look at them yet without feeling like you’ve failed them as a daughter-in-law somehow. Even just a little bit, like you’ve failed them for not being a strong enough woman to give them a grandchild without all this fuss. So you don’t want them to come, not yet. But you want them to know you’re here. You want someone to know you’re here and everything’s fine.

They’re worried for you, you hear it in their voices immediately. Of course they’re worried. Their upper lips may be stiff but their daughter-in-law and their grandchild are in hospital and no one can get ahold of Benedict. You promise them everything will be fine. You are not crying when you say this. You are most definitely not crying. 

“Just… you know, if you hear from Ben, tell him, would you? Tell him we’re fine, we’re okay. It’s just a bit of bed rest.” 

You don’t mention that the baby’s heart rate is still slightly elevated. You don’t mention that you’re being kept in hospital so the doctors can monitor this. You just tell them you’re here to rest. You tell them this so they’ll tell Benedict this, so he won’t panic an ocean and continent away and do something stupid like try to come home early. A week more and he’ll be wrapped.

They promise to pass the message on when they next speak to their son. They tell you they love you. You hang up and immediately give in to the exhaustion that adrenaline leaves in its wake.

\---------- ---------- ----------

Blessedly you sleep through the night. You don’t toss, you don’t turn, nothing aches. Even the hum of the machines is pleasant enough, their beeps a steady reminder that two lives have made it through ‘til morning.

The first thing you’re aware of as you come to is the light pressing in against your eyelids, painfully bright. The next thing you’re aware of is the brush of something against the back of your hand, over and over again, a light touch that seems to be soothing the skin around where your IV is taped. The last thing you become aware of, right before you open your eyes, is the press of lips to the back of that same hand, a low voice murmuring a song against your skin. You turn your head slowly to the side and open your eyes.

You’ve never seen Benedict looked so wrecked before. 

So utterly and completely wrecked.

“Hey there stranger,” you say quietly. It still feels early. Too early for real words, sentiment. You don’t want to cry anymore, not in front of him. He looks like he’s spent the last few hours doing enough for the both of you.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he says.

“Why are you here?” you say.

“Why was I not here earlier, you mean,” he says. He won’t quite look at you. His eyes are red-rimmed and rubbed raw. They stand out less brightly against his California-tanned skin, which makes him look older than he is. His hair has been bleached and fried under too much sun. He doesn’t look quite real. He looks debauched, somehow. Fragile, vulnerable. A little bit stunned.

“I mean, how are you here?” you say. “You should be in L.A.”

“I missed you. God, I missed you. I couldn’t do it. It hurt, being away from you. It physically hurt.” Sentiment: he’s always been so good at it. “After we talked last, I met with the director to see what could be done. I told him about you. He knew, of course, knew I’d left my pregnant wife back in London to do his bloody film. I think he always wanted to get me back here as soon as he could. There was a whole block they didn’t need me for, and he was able to do some re-arranging… fuck, none of that matters. I’m here now. I know I’m too late, and God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry you went through this all on your own.”

“Did you talk to the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Everything is fine, darling.” 

“I love you. I’m sorry.” 

“Try again—just the first part this time.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, too, Benedict.” You smile weakly. He doesn’t smile back. He can’t. He won’t let himself, not yet, because he was on a plane 30,000ft above Salt Lake City when you woke up to bloodstained sheets, to shaking fingers and pain and fear and an empty bed. He hates himself for that—will hate himself for that, for much too long. 

You run your hand across his too-sharp cheekbones and trace the lines under his cat-like eyes. He’s not quite your Benedict, but he will be again, with a little less sun and a little less emaciation. You feel like a beached whale sprawled out on the bed as you are, and him a hunched and sinewy Adonis folded into the plastic chair pulled up close beside you. You make a beautiful beached whale, he’d say, if you ever told him. Something rare and majestic. You’d laugh. He’d kiss you. You’d both be like you were before. 

He intertwines his fingers with yours and kisses them for a long moment. He kisses your wrist and up your arm and unfolds himself from the chair to lean over you at last. This is what you want, for him to be the only thing you see, forever. He lowers himself to press a kiss against your forehead and more down your clammy cheeks, to the corner of your mouth and then there, right there, strong and insistent, his lips against yours, opening and pressing close, tasting, asking to be forgiven. You curl your hand up in his shirt to pull him down closer still, your belly pressing against the flat planes of his torso. Yes, everything, take everything, you say. Forgiveness? It’s yours; take it.

You both pull away flushed and breathless. A nurse standing in the doorway coughs and Benedict jumps back like a scolded schoolboy. You don’t want to ever let him go again.

 

You’re kept in hospital under observation for another three days, until the baby starts to move around again, its heartbeat settling on a strong, steady rhythm that pleases the doctor. Benedict barely leaves your side during those three days, choosing to subsist on cafeteria-quality coffee and catnaps, forever tucked into the chair next to your bed. You know he’ll start getting grumpy eventually, without a proper night’s rest, but he insists. Sometimes he folds his arms on the mattress beside you and rests his head on top. When he sleeps against you like this, you run your fingers through his too-frequently dyed and straightened curls and kiss promises onto his scalp.

You don’t cry yourself to sleep then. You’ve got a proper family holding you upright now.


	5. Chapter 5

The dark cloud that has hung over London—over you—for the past few weeks passes, as it should. Sleepless nights give themselves up to early evenings wrapped around each other, parcelling through Benedict’s list of baby names and yours, trying them out on the air. It becomes a sort of game. One of his, one of yours—you mix and match them with great care and regard and then holler them down the hall, over the breakfast table, into the empty nursery. You see which ones give you goosebumps, which ones make your eyes flutter with fondness. Benedict is particularly susceptible to the effects of this game. His mouth curls in on itself when you hit on one that works—it’s strangely amusing to watch, how his lips stretch wide across his face and then pull downwards as he tries desperately to keep his Cheshire grin in check, fighting the unnecessary battle of keeping his enthusiasm in check. You swat at his chest if he does this and he breaks—the grin spreads clear across his face and he huffs out an unbelieving laugh before rolling over you and burying his face in your neck.

Benedict’s hands are completely at home on your stomach, which is now properly rounded, stretching your shirts in a way that screams BABY ON BOARD wherever you toddle. It has become an unconscious thing, him resting a palm over your protruding belly button as you lie together in bed at night, him reading through a well-worn baby book, you answering texts from your sister about the impending baby shower. He rubs his thumb over the tight skin and you can see him smiling gently out of the corner of your eye, a far-off, contented smile. Before you both fall asleep, he always scoots down the bed and lays his head beside your belly for a few minutes. He kisses it, watches for movement with hooded eyes, and then sings quietly against your skin while he runs his fingers over the substantial bump. Some of the songs you know—”You Are My Sunshine,” “Hush, Little Baby”—but there are others you don’t: obscure nursery rhymes and folk tunes that sound vaguely Celtic. You run your fingers through his hair (dark, auburn again, growing out) while he does this, humming contentedly.

Your days go on like this, in a whirlwind of lazy kisses and stroked stomachs, in breakfasts in bed and bubble baths and names crossed off lists. Scripts pile up on your dining room table but Benedict doesn’t touch them. It’s his way of telling you you’re not in this alone anymore, he’s here now. It’s a promise.

Benedict loves to saddle up behind you when you’re standing in front of the bathroom mirror brushing your teeth or when you’re making porridge on the hob, his chin resting on your shoulder while he presses his lips to your neck and ghosts his fingers over the tiny baby nestled low in your gut. He waits just like that, draped over you, until he feels a kick. You place your hands over his and feel it together, a tiny foot or hand pressing out against yours. Your baby. Benedict still cries sometimes, when you’re standing there like that, together. He wouldn’t call it crying, but you’ve seen those bright blue eyes of his water and he always kisses you for a long moment after that, until it passes, until his eyelashes catch those tiny tears and he can smile against your lips again.

Benedict is very good at this Almost-Being-A-Dad thing. Very good, very dotting. He goes with you to every appointment, introducing himself to the doctors with an apologetic smile already on his lips. He shakes their hands firmly, daring them to ask where he’s been the past seven months. They never do—they’ve seen all sorts, doctors. Absentee fathers are nothing to them and everything to Benedict. Ever giving people a reason to judge him as such is his biggest regret. 

After each appointment he takes you out for frozen yogurt or takes you to Waterstones to browse once more through the children’s section. Benedict always notices the kids tucked into corners reading C. S. Lewis while their parents busy themselves with biographies or cook books. You eye a copy of Ann of Green Gables—your grandmother read it with you when you were a girl—but you never pick it up. Benedict still doesn’t want to know the sex of the baby. It begins making The Name Game a bit tricky. 

You take the Tube back home and Benedict glares at a young man until he gives up his seat for you. It’s something he feels very strongly about, and though he’s not one to make a scene, you think for this he would. Your feet are sore. And your back aches. At the station Benedict helps another woman carry her pram up the stairs. You cling to him very tightly during the walk back to the flat.

Summer is waning. Days are getting shorter, though not much cooler. The August air is heavy from afternoon showers, but you find the humidity comforting. It reminds you of home, when your hair curls into a frizzy mess down your back. Your roots are growing out. You know Benedict prefers a dry living room and a cup of tea to stomping through puddles on the pavement; but more than anything he prefers to see you smile, so he shucks on a light jacket, grabs an umbrella, and follows you out the door to spend an hour or two wandering along the High-street before the sun sets. 

More often than not you find yourself on the Heath, curled in on each other atop a damp park bench, watching the sun sinking low in the west. You watch for families enjoying the last days of August, watch for children trying to coax one more careless summer day out of the city, stomping through the grass in bright yellow Wellies. You see a couple swinging their son between then, each clasping one of his hands in theirs. He giggles unabashedly, his face flush and his eyes shinning. This will be you, you remind yourself. You remind Ben. You poke him in the stomach and nod your head towards the family, but he’s already watching them, a wistful look of longing and anticipation mixing across his features. You want to kiss every part of him.

Now and again you do, slowly, tucked away together in your bedroom on the top floor of a terraced house on the far side of Hampstead. You kiss every inch of him. He kisses every inch of you. Sometimes carefully, sometimes with jerking ruts that make you feel like a teenager again.

Summer gives way to early autumn. It’s not blue and crisp like a New England autumn, but dull and grey. You drink decaf pumpkin spice lattes to make up for this. Benedict builds fires in the living room hearth and then sits in front of it playing on his iPad. There is an inexplicable lightness in the flat, the bright tension of anticipation: anticipation for the new life that will soon illuminate the damp London peaking through the windows. There’s not much to do now but wait.

Midway through September your parents fly in from the States and settle into the office where you’ve shoved aside some filing cabinets and a lamp to make room for a foldout divan. It’s not the most comfortable spot for them to be put up for two weeks, but they never complain. It all seems like a small price to pay to be close by when the baby comes. Benedict is torn between being the ever dutiful and gracious son-in-law he always has been and resenting your mother’s assumption that you’ll need her help once this beautiful screaming child comes into the world. He tells you this in bed one night, assures you that he’s ready and while it’s nice that your parents want to be helpful, he’s been ready to be a father since he was 12. 

“They won’t stay long, Ben, I promise. Just a few weeks. We’ll have plenty of sleepless nights and sick-stained shirts to deal with on our own once they’ve gone,” you say.

 

It happens four days after your parents settle in, a week before you’re expecting it to. Your parents leave early to spend the day exploring the Southbank and Benedict has gone for a long run and breakfast with an old friend.

You wake up with the sun to dismissible cramping in your gut. This happens from time to time, small contractions that flare and fade and leave you with a craving for Oreos dipped in ketchup. Oreos are hard to find in the UK but you know of a small shop near Covent Garden that imports them. Benedict is very familiar with this shop now. It also carries Smores flavoured Pop-Tarts and Butterfingers. But this morning the cramps don’t quiet themselves down after a few cookies and a cup of herbal tea. They slowly become more insistent and each time the pain seems to last a few seconds longer. 30 seconds longer. A minute longer. Benedict home now and showering and you’re counting the minutes between each shock of pain using the clock on your mobile, clutched in your hand as you lie on the couch listening to Louis Armstrong. 

The pipes shutter in the wall beside your head and you know Benedict has finished in the bathroom. It’s been exactly five minutes since the last cramp and you grimace as another one shoots through your abdomen. 

“Ben!” you holler up the stairs. Your voice shakes a little and you pause to grit your teeth and breathe in sharply. He doesn’t answer. 

“Benedict!” You’re louder and more insistent this time. Desperate might also be the word. You imagine “bloody murder” might be the next octave you manage. But before you have to resort to wailing, Benedict comes barrelling down the stairs, a towel wound loosely around his waist and his damp hair curling against his forehead like a freshly washed halo.

“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” He’s rushing towards you, his eyes wide. The wrinkles are all smoothed from his face.

“I think it’s time.”

“Time? For what?” he asks stupidly. You gesture at your stomach. 

“You’re not due for a week.” 

“Then I guess the baby doesn’t take after you because it looks it has decided to arrive a bit early.” Benedict stares at you as if he hasn’t heard.

“Benedict!” You throw a couch pillow at him.

“What?” he exclaims, taking a step back. He holds his hands up in surrender, his towel loosening around his hips.

“I’m going into labour.” He is still just standing there, almost stark naked. “The baby’s coming!”

“The baby’s coming?”

“Yes!” 

“Oh my God.” His façade finally crumbles as your words set in. The baby’s coming. You’re about to be a mother. Benedict’s about to be a father. And of course he was perfectly ready for everything right up until this moment. He stumbles towards you and then away, swirling around as if in search of something, then pauses and looks back at you helplessly. He runs his hands through his hair and they’re shaking. You can see it from across the room.

“Ben, love, calm down—“

“I don’t know what to do!” he exclaims, a cry caught in the back of his throat.

“Yes, you do. We’ve gone through all of this.”

“I’m not ready yet. I was supposed to have another week. I was going to…” he trails off, as if he’s trying to remember something—anything!—he’s left unfinished.

“Yes, you’re ready. We’re ready. There’s nothing left to do, darling, except get me to the hospital so we can finally say hello to our child.” Another contraction hits and you double over, breathing hard, your hands cradling your stomach. Benedict lurches towards you and grabs one of your hands to hold until it passes.

Benedict looks at you for a long moment, fear and excitement and so much love passing through his eyes at a turn. He looks like a man about to get everything he’s ever dreamed of, and so of course he looks scared out of his wits, in the most beautiful way possible. You close your eyes and rest your forehead against his. “Come on, daddy. Let’s go.” 

You know he’s still outwardly shaking but he seems to have inwardly steeled himself at last. He presses a quick kiss to your lips and moves to stand, pulling you up with him. You’re dressed in leggings and an oversized sweater but it’ll have to be good enough. Once he’s certain you’re steady on your feet, Benedict rushes back upstairs to your bedroom and returns a minute later with your shoes and the overnight bag you’ve had packed and sitting in your closet for weeks now. He’s thrown on a pair of jeans and probably the first clean t-shirt he could find.

“We’ll call our parents in the cab,” you say to Benedict as he bundles you into your coat and pulls you out the front door. It’s show time.


	6. Chapter 6

36 hours. It takes 36 hours for that wrinkled little girl to come into the world, screaming and perfect and all yours—yours and Benedict’s. 36 hours of panting and pushing and crushing the tiny bones in Benedict’s not so tiny hand. 

Your parents are in the waiting room with Benedict’s parents throughout the ordeal. Benedict runs messages back and forth—and in the beginning you can hear his shoes screeching down the hallway every time he leaves and returns, always out of breath and desperately worried he has missed something in the last five minutes. His nervous energy lasts longer than you would’ve supposed it would, but even it begins to wane after the first 10… 20… 30 hours. 

By the end he refuses to leave the room and reads T.S. Eliot aloud to you because you’ve decided it soothes you. You know you’d be soothed by listening to him read the phone book at this point, but he prefers poetry. So do you. And so, apparently, does Sophia Louise Cumberbatch, because as soon as he reads out that there will be “time for you and time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea,” the baby decides she’s ready to meet you both, and the real pushing begins.

Benedict stays at your side until screaming fills the severe, whitewashed room. The screaming is good, you both know; you respond by collapsing back on the bed, your chest heaving; Benedict responds by holding his arms out to the nurse who places a bloody, squirming mess into them. You wonder if he can even see her properly with how clouded his eyes are by tears.

“She’s beautiful,” is all he can say before his throat seizes and he gives a strange, strangled cry. A nurse collects the wailing creature from Benedict and retreats to the far side of the room to sort the poor thing out. She’s cold, you think, and the lights are blinding, and she doesn’t yet know that the hearts around her are beating just for her.

She’s more mewling than crying by the time the nurse finishes with her and brings her to you, swathed in a pale pink blanket. You bring her to your chest. You want to see her eyes—you’re certain she has Benedict’s, even if most babies’ eyes are blue at the start—but she’s keeps them resolutely shut against the harsh brightness of the room. Her face is squished up in confusion and her tiny hands are balled into fists near her chin; Benedict hovers over you and holds his hand out until she grasps his index finger.

“Look at her tiny little nails,” he coos, and you’re not sure if there has ever been a more beautiful sight than that of your husband staring with such unbridled wonder and love at the child you made together. You want to tell him this and you want to kiss him at the same time, but it feels like days since you’ve slept and you choose, instead, to hand your daughter off to her slaphappy father and let your eyes flutter shut. 

\---------- ---------- ----------

You’re discharged the next day without complications and Benedict carries your daughter’s bassinet in one hand and holds tightly to yours with the other, leading you back out into the wild and turning world. London’s loud and bright and you worry it might upset Sophie, but she’s young enough—she’s brand new, for goodness sake—to sleep through it all. One day you imagine she might find herself in a warm Dixie bedroom with a heavy August breeze blowing in through the open window and she won’t be able to sleep at all, she’ll be so used to the vibrant bustling of the city.

Your parents stay for two weeks, like promised, and never have fourteen days gone by so quickly. Benedict contemplates asking them to stay longer, just a bit longer—please just stay for a few more 3am feedings and sour-milk spit-ups and oh god are we really going to be able to do this on our own? You do, of course, as well as you can. You’re the who goes to her in the middle of the night because Benedict is grumpy without his eight hours and he handles her around noon when you pass out for a few hours from the exhaustion of it all. Everyone tells you these days, weeks, months, years will go quickly and you’ll somehow miss them when they’re gone; you want to believe them because they seem too hateful to be permanent just now.

Honestly Sophia is not a fussy baby and you know to be thankful. She eats well and sleeps when she should. She gains weight. She likes the color pink and thus all the infant outfits people have sent you as gifts. 

Benedict adores her and she him. He likes to bath her and sing her songs you don’t recognize. You sometimes walk into the kitchen and find him dancing along to The Beatles as he makes you breakfast, Sophia cradled gently against his chest, gurgling happily. When you feel she’s old her, that her immune system is strong enough, the three of you spend late mornings walking the paths on the Heath, around the swimming ponds and down past Keats’ House, which always sets Benedict off on a recital of ‘Ode to a Nightingale.’ You never complain.

You become Benedict’s “girls.” He loves that. He loves coming home and finding you sprawled on the couch reading while Sophia sleeps atop you. He looks at you both and beams, leans down to brush his lips against your forehead before asking, “How are my girls doing?” He’s protective.

Benedict would give up anything for your daughter. He’d give up anything for you. But the time eventually comes for him to start working again and he starts with projects close to home that only keep him away for a few hours at a time. Then he signs on for a film shooting in Oxfordshire and spends whole working days away, always returning home to bed at night. Sophia’s six months before he takes another job overseas. You take a sabbatical and come with him to Los Angeles this time, spending sunny afternoons researching for a book on Fitzgerald’s Hollywood years while Sophia babbles happily in her playpen beside your desk.

You buy her a rose covered sunbonnet at a shop in Beverly Hills and you all spend your weekends at the beach or hiking up Runyon Canyon together, a compact little family unused to the dry L.A. heat.

“Can I say I am incandescently happy without sounding like a Jane Austen heroine,” Benedict says one day.

“No,” you say playfully.

“Fine. I am astonishingly, impossibly, heart-wrenchingly happy. Better?”

“Much.” You crawl into his lap and arrange yourself comfortable. Sophia’s asleep upstairs.

“You’ve given me everything I’ve ever wanted,” he says gently, tucking a bit of loose hair behind your ear.

“And you’ve given me even more than that.” You press your lips to his softly but insistent, your hands resting on his chest. “Promise we’ll always be this happy. Exhausted and overwhelmed, sure, but ultimately happy,” you say, pulling away.

“We will, love. We will. I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end. Soppy and just a bit of fun. Hope you survived all the DaddyBatch feels!


End file.
